1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automatic transmission for a vehicle. More particularly, the present invention relates to a planetary gear train of an automatic transmission for a vehicle that can improve mountability and power delivery performance and reduce fuel consumption.
2. Description of Related Art
Recently, vehicle makers direct all their strength to improve fuel economy due to worldwide high oil prices and strengthen of exhaust gas regulations.
Improvement of fuel economy may be achieved by multi-shift mechanism realizing greater number of shift speeds in an automatic transmission. Typically, a planetary gear train is realized by combining a plurality of planetary gear sets and friction elements.
It is well known that when a planetary gear train realizes a greater number of shift speeds, speed ratios of the planetary gear train can be more optimally designed, and therefore a vehicle can have economical fuel mileage and better performance. For that reason, the planetary gear train that is able to realize more shift speeds is under continuous investigation.
Though achieving the same number of speeds, the planetary gear train has a different operating mechanism according to a connection between rotation elements (i.e., sun gear, planet carrier, and ring gear). In addition, the planetary gear train has different features such a durability, power delivery efficiency, and size depend on the layout thereof. Therefore, designs for a combining structure of a gear train are also under continuous investigation.
If the number of shift-speeds, however, increases, the number of components in the automatic transmission also increases. Therefore, mountability, cost, weight and power delivery efficiency may be deteriorated.
Particularly, since the planetary gear train having a number of components is hard to be mounted in a front wheel drive vehicle, researches for minimizing the number of components have been developed.
The information disclosed in this Background of the Invention section is only for enhancement of understanding of the general background of the invention and should not be taken as an acknowledgement or any form of suggestion that this information forms the prior art already known to a person skilled in the art.